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Monday, February 1, 2016

Review: The White Voyage by John Christopher

Genre:
Literary Fiction

Description:

Dublin
to Dieppe to Amsterdam. A routine trip for the cargo ship Kreya, her
Danish crew, and handful of passengers. Brief enough for
undercurrents to remain below the surface and secrets to stay buried.

When
a violent storm disables the vessel, the crew and passengers are
forced to face their humanity and either pull together or face
disaster.

Author:

Sam Youd was
born in Lancashire in April 1922, during an unseasonable
snowstorm.

As a boy, he was devoted to the newly emergent
genre of science-fiction: 'In the early thirties,' he later wrote,
'we knew just enough about the solar system for its possibilities to
be a magnet to the imagination.'

Over the following decades,
his imagination flowed from science-fiction into general novels,
cricket novels, medical novels, gothic romances, detective thrillers,
light comedies ... In all he published fifty-six novels and a myriad
of short stories, under his own name as well as eight different
pen-names.

He is perhaps best known as John Christopher,
author of the seminal work of speculative fiction, The
Death of Grass
(today available as a Penguin Classic), and a stream of novels in the
genre he pioneered, young adult dystopian fiction, beginning with The
Tripods Trilogy.

Appraisal:

White
Voyage’s premise is far
from new—place a group of strangers in a life threatening situation
and see what happens—yet the author’s prose flowed so smoothly,
and his characters felt so true, that I really enjoyed the journey.

The
story rolls along at a sedate pace, but even this impatient reader
was never tempted to skip-read. The interaction between the
characters and the feeling of impending doom that hangs over the
novel kept me engaged. I wanted to know who the winners and losers
would be. Who would unravel? Who would dig deep and find the will to
overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles?

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